Years before he became the unofficial "Mayor of Chinatown," celebrated chef Tony Hu says he left his family's Sichuan Province farm in shame after bombing a college entrance exam.

Over the next three decades, Hu used that humiliating experience to fuel his ambition, training as a chef and building a thriving restaurant business in Chicago that prosecutors said did nearly $40 million in annual sales.

But on Friday, Hu, twice turned and gave a full bow in a federal courtroom packed with supporters before he apologized to his family for entangling them in a scheme to hide nearly $10 million in cash receipts over a five-year period, skirting about $1 million in sales taxes to Illinois.

"I feel such a shame for what I have done," he said in a quiet, raspy voice. "I was very proud of my accomplishments. But now I am lost. I cannot sleep, I cannot eat, sometimes I feel like I don't want to live."

U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve sentenced the restaurateur to a year and a day in prison and fined him $100,000. The extra day qualifies Hu for good time credit.

Hu had already paid $1.087 million in court-ordered restitution, selling several restaurants to generate the cash, his lawyer said.

"This court cannot send the message" that if you're wealthy enough to pay restitution "you can walk," St. Eve said. "You've lived the American Dream, but that does not give you the license to ... defraud the state."

Lawyers for Hu, 49, sought probation, but prosecutors asked for about 4 1/2 years in prison.

Just three days after he was charged in May, Hu pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering charges. As part of the deal, prosecutors agreed not to charge the family members he'd brought into the scheme.

When the FBI raided Hu's Chinatown home two years ago, agents discovered a veritable "assembly line" for doctoring sales records for the two sets of books he kept for his businesses, federal prosecutors said.

Three piles of receipts were found in Hu's living room: records on his couch still to be doctored, those already altered with handwritten figures that grossly underreported what his restaurants actually took in, and cash receipts and income reports from restaurant managers that he planned to destroy, prosecutors alleged.

St. Eve said agents seized more than 100 large garbage bags stuffed with receipts. Hu was training his nephew in the scheme, chastising him at one point for showing him the actual sales records instead of the cooked books, prosecutors said.

Hu's attorneys said Hu had been trained to report only part of the receipts when he took an ownership interest in his first Chinatown restaurant and simply continued the practice as his business expanded.

"Tony foolishly believed this was the practice of doing business in Chinatown," said Sheldon Zenner, his lead lawyer.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney William Ridgway scoffed at that explanation.

"Greed is the only explanation," Ridgway said. "Why else would you perpetuate a fraud of this magnitude?"

A 2012 Tribune feature on Hu indicated he had ambitious plans for the next five years, including opening restaurants in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles and even having his company, Tony Gourmet Group, traded publicly on the stock market.

The probe became public in October 2014 when FBI and IRS agents raided eight of Hu's restaurants in Chicago and a ninth in suburban Downers Grove. The restaurants had to be shuttered for several hours as agents carted out boxes of records.

As part of the probe, agents dined while undercover at two of Hu's restaurants to try to learn more about how a record of transactions was maintained, even questioning waiters on the subject, the court records show.

It's unclear how many restaurants Hu now runs, but at one time his business numbered as many as a dozen restaurants, the bulk of them concentrated within a half-square-mile area near the heart of Chinatown.

He was best known for the Lao Sze Chuan franchise, but he also owned restaurants in the north and west suburbs and even Connecticut and Las Vegas at one time.

Hu, whose given name is Hu Xiaojun, is a naturalized U.S. citizen and will not face deportation because of his felony conviction. Zenner told the judge Friday he would seek permission for Hu to visit his elderly mother in China before reporting to prison in February.